Are the tides changing?

For more than a decade, I've been keenly aware of pressures on 'the middle class'. For almost a decade, I've been amazed at how much wealth is flowing upward. The occupy movement has shown that the youth are the most perceptive of these issues.

For years now, I've resigned myself to the idea that no matter how great the injustice, society will just adjust and accept it as long as it's introduced slowly enough - incrementally. Tonight, for the first time in years, I got the idea that maybe the world really is waking up.

Oddly my 'epiphany' came from watching the second of two comedy movies in as many days. Last night I watched 'The Other Guys' - a comedy that actually made some rather piercing statements about Wall Street and the SEC; going so far as to run some 'Occupy'-type stats in the credits. Tonight I watched 'The Campaign' - a comedy that showed how the 'Motch' brothers might buy a single congressional candidate to do their bidding.

The appearance of these themes in mainstream film makes me wonder if there are actually people in Hollywood taking concern over what's been happening in the world economy. Could these silly movies actually be a signal that more people are waking up? Are they just using their themes to market their movies - or are they actually trying to spread a message to a politically apathetic audience?

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I was just thinking that the "fat cats" have probably become a little too successful for their own good. They've been getting richer while driving the middle class toward poverty. Their prejudices against women and ethnic minorities have been made abundantly clear. Their candidate lost the recent U.S. Presidential election by what was a rather large electoral margin.

Their chickens are coming home to roost, it seems.

Now, they are casting about for ways to win back female and Hispanic voters (the black vote having been written off for good, it seems). However, they've done so much damage that I think they may be on their way to being a third party in the U.S. I'm not sure what the new second party will be. A green party, or perhaps a split off Tea Party. Time will tell.

I do see big changes on the horizon, though, and I am not gloomy about the future at all.

I'm a bit gloomy about the future in that I feel our 'golden age' is going to be defined by the years during which we used more and more petrol. Once those reserves can no longer supply the gluttony, our future is going to be leaner, and that will pose some challenges.

What I'm most concerned with, however, is whether or not we'll ever be able to put in place a system of checks and balances to establish some sort of equilibrium between capital and labour. Few people seem willing to discuss this and I don't think we'll get anywhere until this issue is at the forefront of the mind of the population at large.

If the tide is turning now, it will be obliterated by the youth coming. I see late teens and twenty somethings fighting for Gay rights, demanding equality for all woman everywhere. The issue is we are in the two world mode. One foot in capitalism trying to do business as it always has been done, the other foot trying to tweak the model to sustain it. until we respect the leaders who can show us what we can do, explore philosphies we historicaly shunned, or even use "failure" as a part of life and learning. We will as the shampoo bottle says, rinse and repeat ourselves into callamity after callamity. I'ts a fundamental philosphy that we ignore to our own destruction. Leadership is not always knowing the way to go, but the flexibility to change the path to a better one.

...when you consider that many of the people implicated in all this immoral greedy behavior are "children of the sixties" it makes me wonder if today's "occupy" generation will trade in their ideals too. i certainly hope not. even the sumo wrestlers were caught throwing matches for money and breaking their sacred oath and then you have lance armstrong who just lies, lies, and lies. It's like that joke in unseen's post, two lawyers meet in an elevator and lied hello to each other. Not a lot of Integrity in this overly religious world.

I don't know if it's a matter of them compromising on their ideals or that the system itself bent on constant growth cannot be sustained. we only got one world and it can only hold and be raped to a certain point until nature shakes us off and starts again or we learn our lessons.

The most affordable energy is that contained in what is called fossil fuel. The world is burning through the oil part of that at a fast pace making it less and less affordable, but don't worry we have plenty of coal.

The key is: those who control the energy supply control the world and unless you have tapped into the natural gas deposit in the ground under your house, you have no control over your own energy supply need/wants.

We are all slaves to the system of human survival and self-centered greed is integral to it.

The modern world looks to me like a very large Titanic with everyone trying to get a chair on the top deck close to the band. :D